PRESENTATION: Arcangelo Sassolino-Present tense

Arcangelo Sassolino’s work is the result of a close dialogue between art and physics. His interest in mechanics and technology opens up new meanings and possibilities for sculpture. Speed, pressure, gravity, acceleration and heat are the core of his artistic practice, which is always aimed at pushing the ultimate limit of matter’s resistance.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galleria Continua Archive

Arcangelo Sassolino’s solo exhibition “Present Tense” confronts viewers with a body of new work that insists on instability as both subject and method. The exhibition is less a presentation of objects than a staging of processes, where matter resists containment and the present reveals itself only in the act of slipping away. Industrial oil functions as the exhibition’s central material and conceptual axis. Thick, black, and opaque, it is reconfigured as sculptural substance, circulating across steel surfaces in a state of permanent flux. Sassolino leverages its volatility as both form and metaphor: a refusal of fixity, a reminder that time and matter remain perpetually unsettled. What might appear as mechanical precision quickly collapses into unpredictability, as gravity and viscosity negotiate an uneasy equilibrium. For Sassolino, “conflict” is not a narrative theme but a structural principle of his practice. His work consistently pits opposing forces against one another—rigid industrial components against fragile states of matter, control against accident, the permanence of sculpture against the ephemerality of transformation. Rather than imposing resolution, the artist emphasizes process, allowing material and force to determine outcomes. Sculpture becomes autonomous, unfolding in real time, its form inseparable from its transience. The artist situates this inquiry within a broader critique of boundaries—between technology and nature, stability and dissolution, duration and disappearance. By engaging petroleum-derived fluids that remained in geological stasis for millions of years, Sassolino reintroduces them into a cycle of transformation. Their continuous flow across polished steel surfaces underscores the impossibility of seizing a single instant. Drops that detach from the main mass do more than mark dispersion; they articulate the passage of time itself, registering irreversibility as material fact. “Present Tense” ultimately operates as a proposition about temporality. Time here is not a linear measure but a destabilized field, constantly disassembling and reconfiguring. The works stage this condition not metaphorically but materially: viewers witness the impossibility of freezing the present, its inevitable erosion built into the mechanics of the piece. Sassolino’s insistence on process highlights the futility of permanence and points toward a sculptural language premised on duration, loss, and continual becoming. The exhibition is not about objects but about what resists objecthood. By foregrounding the instability of matter, Sassolino directs attention to the present as a site of conflict—between appearance and disappearance, control and entropy. “Present Tense” offers no resolution, but instead forces recognition of the paradox at the core of existence: the attempt to grasp what cannot, by its nature, be held.

Photo: Arcangelo Sassolino, Impar7al silence, 2025, granite, glass and steel, 165 x 83 x 45 cm, 64.96 x 32.67 x 17.71 in, Courtesy: the ar+st and GALLERIA CONTINUA, Photographer: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio

Info: Galleria Continua, Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano, SI, Italy, Duration: 03/05-07/09/2025, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, www.galleriacontinua.com/